To Be Continued #6

Previously on To Be Continued...

"What's your advice for breaking in to comics?"

"Right now, it's tougher than it's ever been."

"There are geniuses who can't find work, much less guys like us."

"I've never heard of a writer who broke in with only an unsolicited pitch."

"Trust me, you never want to be in The Big Pile."

"Bear with me folks, it gets worse."

And this time on To Be Continued...

You've decided that you want to write comics professionally. After two weeks of "observation" at the local psychiatric clinic, you are unaccountably given a clean bill of mental health. You fire up the word processor and go to work.

Within a couple of pages the truth is obvious, you are a visionary, at the height of your powers. Your proposal is the best thing anybody's ever written. Moreover, it's so commercial that it clearly has the power to single-handedly revitalize our troubled industry. Satisfied at a job well done, you put it in a FedEx overnight and send it off to the Editor most deserving of your gifts. You decide to go to bed early, as you want to be wide awake for the phone call tomorrow morning, offering you the job.

The call never comes.

That's okay. You're patient. You even wait a couple weeks before you decide to call the Editor up and give him a nudge. You get the voicemail, because no editor ever answers his own phone. This is a policy that started around 1995 or so. The reason? Because the person on the line might be a friend of the editor's, asking for work. Nobody likes blowing off their friends, but it's marginally easier than hearing them cry. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Voicemail:

"This is Dwayne McEditor, at Big Ol Comics. Leave a message at the tone and if you're a freelancer who owes me work, that's me on the other line, calling you. If you're a freelancer who is looking for work, how are you man? Good to see you again, we should talk some time. Really. If I don't know you, talk as long as you want, I'm going to fast-forward past your message anyway." BEEEEEEP

"Um, Hi. This is Dwayne McFreelancer. I Uh, sent you a proposal for a revamp of Potato-Man? It's the one where his sidekick, Small Fry The Spud Wonder, gets killed and Potato-Man has to come to terms with his unresolved romantic feelings for him? And goes crazy like Wolverine? Or kind of like Mel Gibson in the first couple of Lethal Weapons before he went all soft in the last two? Anyway, you can reach me at..."

You weren't paying attention, were you? It doesn't matter where he can reach you. He erased your message as soon as he figured out you weren't the inker.

Welcome to The Big Pile.

The Big Pile is where all your carefully crafted proposals end up. At the moment, The Big Pile has a couple hundred other submissions in it (only a couple dozen if the editor is particularly fastidious. You should be so lucky). The stuff at the bottom of the big pile (which is usually the stuff that was at the top of the big pile when the editor was hired) is now compost. Stuff that goes into The Big Pile is never seen again, even if it's terrific. Why? Because nothing in the big pile will ever get read. As much as they'd like to, comic book editors don't have time to find new talent. Their job is to get the books out the door and their priorities go something like this:

1. Keep anybody from noticing me, so I don't get fired.

2. Get the books out on time, so I don't get fired.

3. Hire people who my boss doesn't hate, so I don't get fired.

4. Hire people who get the books out on time, so my boss doesn't notice and then fire me.

5. Don't make eye contact with people on the business side. I don't know exactly what they do but I'm pretty sure any one of them has the power to fire me.

6. Update resume.

Skipping down a bit:

167. Get haircut.

168. Take Kurt Busiek to lunch and offer him my book to write. Even though I know he won't accept, my boss will approve the expense report and I want to try that expensive new Vietnamese place.

169. Ditto for Peter David and the Ethiopian place (note to self: keep delicious bread handy, that chilli-looking stuff is hot).

170. Sort unsolicited submissions pile.

Yeah. You're a pretty low priority.

Seriously, an editor who keeps his job is an editor who shares priorities with the company (or can trick them into thinking that they share priorities, all the while sneaking good stuff out the door). Talent development, no matter what they might say on the Corporate Hype Pages, is pretty close to no priority at all. Back when I was an editorling at Marvel, so many years ago that Jim Shooter hadn't even started one company yet, the "Submissions Editor" was always the lowest-ranking, most recently-hired editor on staff. Even this person, who generally didn't know how to do their job yet (unless my job was losing pages, I was great at losing pages), didn't have time to go through the submissions. They had work to do.

The Big Pile at Marvel was a box, in the back of the closet we kept GI Joe toys in (we needed them for reference. That's what we told Hasbro). Periodically, the pile would get so high you couldn't open the door to get toys out. When this happened, Editor-In-Chief Tom DeFalco would make all the assistant editors stay late "evaluating" the submissions, until the pile was gone. Evaluating submissions meant checking off boxes on a form letter and shoving the thing into a return envelope as fast as we could. Unless they were so bad that they were funny. In which case, we'd read them aloud to each other and laugh, then shove them into a return envelope. We could do this with impunity because none of our own crappy submissions were in the pile. Except for once, and I won't tell you whose it was because I wouldn't want to embarrass Dave Wohl.

It pretty much works the same way today, except now nobody ever makes us clean out the closet. This breaking in thing is going to be much tougher than you thought. But you've got your first weapon to use to break through the clutter and stay out of The Big Pile. You know what the editor is thinking. In the next issue of Cosmo, we're going to discuss how to attract &emdash;and keep&emdash; his attention!

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